Surplus value and knowledge work
A workers’ total labor is obfuscated when their workday doesn't look like an assembly line job — so what if the factory is your brain?
According to Marx, workers are exploited through mythology, economics, and through selective retellings of history.
Workers are presented with the foundational “myths” of labor, value, and accumulation, being told about the “divine right of capitalist kings” as if these fictions were unquestionable truths, not unlike the central tenants religion and theology (McIntosh 1997:72). Economically, workers’ total labor — what they produce, how fast they produce it, and which discrete parts they produce — is obfuscated by factors that set up production and labor to create scaling technologies or systems (that is, anything that operates in an production economy of scale like a printing press) or through the artificial marking off of periods or settings in which one could labor for a wage — that is, through the working day or the “9 to 5” (though these hours were greatly expanded for laborers in Marx’s time).
Marx points out that in the Industrial workday, the output of products has increased — for instance, mass production means greater capacity and speed than, say, the work of a single cobbler. Infrastructure, overhead, occupancy, and wages themselves are crystalized or reified into “instruments of production” that can be optimized and increased to generate greater value (Marx 1983:398–99). This setting highlights two important concepts — use value versus exchange value, and Marx’s “labor theory of value.”
Use value would be what the cobbler (in the example above) can effectively produce with individual, personal skill and capacity, for the ends that the cobbler needs. That is to say, the use value of the cobbler’s product could be traded for the products of a farmer (who in turn needs the products of the shoemaker). However, this whole system changes when capitalists crystalize “instruments of production” to 1) produce more than “individual, personal skill and capacity” can produce and 2) to mechanize the processes, so that further costs can be saved, or critical masses can be reached. What then happens to this “extra” production and products? They become surplus, and these surpluses are then sold. What is then earned does not simply cover the cost of “instruments of production,” but it becomes superfluous, overabundant capital. This capital is not shared with any of these “instruments” of labor — just as the equipment on the factory floor doesn’t get a share of the profits, neither does the worker who produced those profits.
The worker, to be eligible for a wage at the capitalist’s factory, suffers an “opportunity cost” to get that wage. They are not free to “clock out” after earning enough for their day’s food and lodging, and not after they have earned enough to pay for the “at cost” use of the equipment. Rather, to get the benefit of getting to get a paycheck, they must also sign up for increasing the surplus of what the capitalist demands. The capitalist is not providing work so that people don’t go hungry; they are providing jobs so they increase their profit, past the point at which their laborers’ needs are met or past the point of where equipment can be purchased (Marx 1983:407–8).
In today’s world of “knowledge work” and fully online jobs, capitalists seek to maintain the instruments of labor and the surpluses from it, so they introduce invasive employee monitoring, “performance management,” or remind the employees “who’s boss” through invading employee privacy in legal ways (Turner 2023:n.p). On the other hand, workers understand that they live in the post-Industrialist capital-driven age — wage labor will likely exist until some other force changes it. Workers will be exploited. However, if one can be exploited less, due to flexible, remote work, or if one can have other fringe benefits such as being able to be a “digital nomad” while they hold down a virtual job, then this perhaps sweetens the deal for workers.
References
Marx, Karl. 1983. The Portable Karl Marx. edited by E. Kamenka. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
McIntosh, Ian, ed. 1997. Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. New York, NY: NYU Press.
Turner, Fred. 2023. “You Call This ‘Flexible Work’?: The Future of Work.” New York Times (Online). Retrieved September 14, 2024 (https://www.proquest.com/docview/2799387323/citation/C67A7D439E98427APQ/1).